CityWalk, an outdoor mall in Hollywood, figures prominently in two terrible date flicks I saw this weekend, Shopgirl and Deewane Huye Paagal. Perhaps I can spare you the pain.

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In the Anand Tucker-directed Shopgirl, the extremely funny Jason Schwartzman takes Claire Danes out on a date to CityWalk just to sit and watch its theater marquee from the outside because he doesn’t have the cheddar to take them both. ‘Well, we could split it,’ she says cautiously. To repeat an old joke, she offers her honor, he honors her offer, and all night long it’s ‘honor’ and ‘offer.’ Tucker, whose father is desi, serves up this mini-haha:

‘Lisa?’
‘Ray.’
’Lisa Ray, it’s nice to meet you.’

I’m not sure whether Tucker’s Bolly-aware enough to sneak in a desi shout-out, but producer Ashok Amritraj certainly is. Sadly, the rest of this bildungsroman about a lonely salesgirl is so slow-moving and trite that the little double entendre was my highlight. Steve Martin sleepwalks through the movie. The Martin I loved from Roxanne in junior high still makes movies for 12-year-olds — saccharine, kiddie and devoid of edge. His novella-based voiceovers are from the Bulwer-Lytton school of writing. Danes’ character spends much of the movie next to glove mannequins, disembodied hands pointing at the sky. Hands beseeching heaven are exactly what came to mind when I realized how long this movie ran.

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The same appall-mall shows up at the end of Deewane Huye Paagal (Suitors Gone Crazy), a charmless Bollywood film which tries to recapture the comedic energy of the jittery, hilarious blockbuster Hera-Pheri. The same comedic trio (Akshay Kumar, Sunil Shetty and Paresh Rawal) attempts a complete rip of There’s Something About Mary. Vijay Raaz and Johnny Lever top off the yuks. The movie lifts a key fight scene from Ong Bak, trademark moves and all, as well as the melody from a Juggy D hit. There’s plenty of obligatory T&A; apparently all blondes are strippers, all desi women wear micro-minis, and the best way to affirm a male lead’s virility is to surround him with gay backup dancers. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The Cher-cheekboned Rimi Sen is all bone structure without charisma, and her mottled blue contacts are irritating.

The movie’s casual racism is the most depressing bit. A black bad guy is a grunting, pec-dancing racial caricature out of Mortal Kombat. Akshay Kumar calls him kaliya (darkie) and says, ‘Play his kind of music, something with bongo.’ A chubby South Indian parody wears a crocheted brown rug on his head and a long, frizzy moustache. He’s slapped around for speaking Tamil instead of Punjabi-accented Hindi. In a movie this mean-spirited, you just know the original’s handicapped jokes are retained.

I must, however, commend the comically inaccurate subtitles. The subtitles read ‘five’ when a character was saying ‘six’ and ‘six’ when he said ‘seven.’ The captions had him entering Bar X, but the next shot was of the neon sign for Bar Y. They were an independent source of amusement. But then any movie which begins with a misspelling (‘These charaters are fictional…’) advertises its language-cad intentions up front.

DHP makes me despair for mainstream Indian film. It’s not for lack of money, editing or effects; it’s that writers are perfectly content to refry overseas hits. And it’s a reminder that a culture that’s unsophisticated about dating, though wonderful with love, will neither appreciate nor correct its own cheesiness for some time yet. Movies this bad make me appreciate the sewage my canary-in-a-coalmine suffers to find me the handful of great Bollyflicks every year.

And I’m staying the hell away from CityWalk. Like the Poltergeist graveyard, it’s an Indian burial ground.

Related posts: Shopguy